NDSeq: runtime checking for nondeterministic sequential specifications of parallel correctness

  • Authors:

  • Jacob Burnim;Tayfun Elmas;George Necula;Koushik Sen

  • Affiliations:

  • University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA;University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA;University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA;University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 32nd ACM SIGPLAN conference on Programming language design and implementation
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

We propose to specify the correctness of a program's parallelism using a sequential version of the program with controlled nondeterminism. Such a nondeterministic sequential specification allows (1) the correctness of parallel interference to be verified independently of the program's functional correctness, and (2) the functional correctness of a program to be understood and verified on a sequential version of the program, one with controlled nondeterminism but no interleaving of parallel threads. We identify a number of common patterns for writing nondeterministic sequential specifications. We apply these patterns to specify the parallelism correctness for a variety of parallel Java benchmarks, even in cases when the functional correctness is far too complex to feasibly specify. We describe a sound runtime checking technique to validate that an execution of a parallel program conforms to its nondeterministic sequential specification. The technique uses a novel form of conflict-serializability checking to identify, for a given interleaved execution of a parallel program, an equivalent nondeterministic sequential execution. Our experiments show a significant reduction in the number of false positives versus traditional conflict-serializability in checking for parallelization bugs.